Without any of us ever having a say, we’ve become subjects of quasi-governmental powers who know the intimate facts of our lives.
Friday morning, during the annual Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh, a crowd of about 100 attendees gathered in the exhibitor hall to loudly protest the presence of Meta at the event. The giant company was a Premier Sponsor of the conference, which brought together several thousand liberal and progressive activists for three packed days of trainings, panels and keynotes. Brittany Williams, an organizer with the Facebook Users Union who helped organize the protest, wrote her fellow attendees, “Facebook should not be here. They just helped prosecute a teen and her mom for seeking an abortion. Facebook also allowed anti-abortion advocates to use data from abortion seekers to target them with anti-abortion ads. Facebook has aided in genocide in Ethiopia and India. They have meddled in elections in India. They are being accused of human trafficking of workers in Kenya. Facebook should not be allowed in our progressive space -PERIOD.”
At the exact same time that the anti-Meta protest was pulling together, a similar number of Netroots attendees were attending a scheduled training session called “Advanced Facebook Strategies for Organizing,” led by Beth Becker, one of the progressive movement’s top tech gurus. She was there to help people adapt to the changes Facebook has made in the last year, “from the deprioritization of political content to keywordpocalypse and the Apple iOS change in Facebook Ads,” according to the session description. “This session will look at the biggest changes and share some strategies to bounce back from them.”
Today, Becker told me that she supported the protesters 100%, but made no apology for her session. The situation, she said, is “complicated and super messy.” But, she added, “as long as the people we need to reach are using the platform, it needs to be part of the mix we use. Should it be the only one? No. But we should not cede the space, to be honest any online space, to the right-wing extremists.”
Progressive activists aren’t the only ones caught in a hard place when it comes to our collective dependence on companies like Meta, Google, Amazon or Apple. In the last twenty years, these platforms have insinuated themselves into our daily lives in so many ways they’ve come to have a quasi-governmental role in deciding how we live, without any of us ever having consented to giving them that power. And their decisions on what content to protect or police are highly capricious.
At Netroots, the protesters were slamming Facebook for a whole array of issues, including how it has helped spread climate, Covid and election disinformation, but mainly for its recent decision to give prosecutors in Nebraska private messages that a young woman and her mother shared as they were dealing with her need for an abortion, leading to their indictment under the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. They could have just as easily been protesting YouTube (another event Premier Sponsor) for its lax handling of political and public health disinformation. Or they could have hammered Google, which is in the news today for how its automatic filtering of potential child porn prompted the San Francisco Police Department to investigate a local man after he sent photos of his toddler’s genitals to his pediatrician in order to get urgent care for an infection. The police cleared the man of any wrongdoing, but a year later the man still hasn’t regained access to his Google account.
As The New York Times reports, “Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.” The man has met a brick wall with Google, and he’s been told it could cost him thousands of dollars to sue the company to try to get his old account and data access back.
Obviously this is an edge case, and the big tech platforms do a lot of vital work to stem to flow of child pornography and exploitation. But until we get robust federal privacy legislation that protects users first, anyone who needs to communicate anything sensitive should think twice before relying on Facebook or Google. Big Brother is watching. And he’s accountable to no one.